Tamer Nafar’s First Solo Tour Refines a Story He’s Been Telling for Decades

Tamer Nafar is in Amsterdam, seven European shows into a tour for his first solo album. He’s been refining the setlist from Birkenhead to Brussels, trying to nail the narrative arc. “Last night, I think we got it right,” he says, speaking to his bandmates while on the road. The album, In the Name of the Father, the Imam and John Lennon, pushes his decades-long practice of storytelling through hip-hop into new territory.

Nafar co-founded DAM in the late 1990s, building a sound from scratch in a place with no hip-hop infrastructure. Growing up in Lydda, a neglected mixed city near Tel Aviv, he found an outlet in translating Tupac lyrics and writing his own. DAM’s 2001 single “Min Irhabi” went viral after a mention in Rolling Stone France, and the group became synonymous with Arabic hip-hop. The new solo record converges personal and political threads, but on tour, Nafar’s focus is sequencing — which song follows which, how the story lands.

He’s been working on the album for years, driven by urgency. The tour itself is an experiment in how language and narrative operate in a live setting, something Nafar has always treated as both art and responsibility. He’s fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, but the positioning of words, not the language alone, is what he’s chasing on stage.